Hitting the Nail on the Head

1. Jan Struther, the well-known and successful writer, lecturer, radio performer etc. (with a subdivision called Jan Struther, the much-too-little-known and really pretty terrific serious poet whose depth and brilliance will only really be appreciated by a discerning literary public after she is dead!)

That ‘item no. 1’ was the first on a list concocted by my grandmother Jan Struther in a letter to her brother Douglas in 1951. Jan was famous as the creator of Mrs Miniver, the Chelsea housewife (partly based on her) whose cheerful wifely and motherly common sense had enchanted readers of The Times in 1938–9, before being snapped up by MGM for the film based on the character, Mrs Miniver, in 1942. When Jan wrote that letter, six years after the end of the war, Douglas was suffering from depression, a condition with which Jan was all too familiar. In order to cheer him up and show her empathy, she listed all the roles, public and private, that she was trying to juggle. Well, that hopeful prediction about being recognized as a ‘pretty terrific serious poet’ hasn’t happened, and she died 65 years ago. If you count hymns as poems, which I think I do, because George Herbert’s certainly are, the only poem for which Jan is famous is her hymn ‘Lord of all hopefulness’, written for Percy Dearmer’s Songs of Praise in 1930. It’s a top wedding and funeral choice, a fact that illustrates Jan’s ability to entwine happiness and sadness. Jan would be surprised at the success of that hymn, as she wasn’t a churchgoer and thought she would only be remembered for Mrs Miniver. One of the roles she mentioned in that list to her brother was the expatriate Jan, now living in the USA, who longed to hear a peal of bells from an English church tower, ‘so long as she wouldn’t have to go to the service’. I wish I could help her with her bid for Poets’ Corner but I fear it’s too late. As she herself wrote,

Like rays once shed By a spent star The words of a dead Poet are, That through bleak space Unchecked fly on, Though heart, hand, face To dust are gone, And you who read Shall only guess What thorn-sharp need, What loneliness, What love, lust, dream, Shudder or sigh Lit the long beam That meets your eye.

The instantly noticeable thing about Jan’s poems is that you can understand them. I worry that this means they can’t be very good. Reading English at university in the 1980s, I was indoctrinated into the T. S. Eliot-inspired theory that for a poem to be great it has to be difficult, or at least ambiguous. Jan’s poems aren’t difficult to understand. They just express a refreshing thought in a concise, usually rhyming way. For example, this thought about the three stages of falling in love:

When to this fire I held a taper, First flared the impressionable paper; I watched the paper, as I stood, Kindle the more enduring wood; And from the wood a vanguard stole To set alight the steadfast coal. So, when I love, the first afire Is body, with its quick desire; Then in a little while I find The flame has crept into my mind ‒ Till steadily, sweetly burns the whole Bright conflagration of my soul.

Here are some of her thoughts, in her first collected book of poems, Betsinda Dances (1931). London love can be just as romantic as country love in spite of the less romantic backdrop. I’m stuck in my relationship with you, strangled by the cobwebs of habit. It’s better to be madly in love and not loved back than vice versa. King Midas could make gold but he couldn’t make a buttercup. A beloved person has died: let us forget her rather than remember her, as remembrance is too painful. Life goes too fast but the days go too slowly. Our love affair was too brief and now lies dead, but don’t bury it because it might flicker back into life. Hooray, I’m out of love: I’m free, but ‘tortured, blind, mad, caged’, I was once a god. Each of those thoughts is fashioned into a short poem that rhymes and scans. I wonder what Jan’s husband Tony thought of some of those poems, especially the ones about being trapped in a dull marriage and about having brief love affairs. They were still madly in love in 1931, I’m pretty sure. It was only two years later that everything started to go wrong when Tony got too interested in golf. She dedicates the book to him, with a charming bit of doggerel, addressing the question of whether a happy person can write good poetry:

For only in two kinds of earth Can poets bring their songs to birth – In sorrow’s rich and heavy clay, Or else (and here’s the rarer way) Out of the loamy light caress Of an abundant happiness.

From the early 1920s Jan started writing verses for Punch under the pseudonym ‘Jan’, illustrated by E. H. Shepard. They were published by Methuen in 1932 in Sycamore Square and Other Verses, and are now highly collectible, not for the poems but for the Shepard illustrations. But you couldn’t have one without the other. These are definitely verses, not poetry: short-lined rhyming couplets about life in a London square (based on Wellington Square, the cul-de-sac in Chelsea where Jan and Tony lived with their children, bicycles, tricycles, nanny, muffin man, bobby on the beat and so on). In the same vein, Jan and E. H. Shepard produced The Modern Struwwelpeter as a Christmas book for 1935: cautionary verses inspired by the foibles of Jan’s own children and their cousins. From which I still quote to myself, when in the role of ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’,

Children, nowadays (it’s funny) Seem to think one’s made of money.

When the Mrs Miniver phenomenon took off in 1939 and 1940, Jan’s new publishers, Chatto & Windus, begged her for any other work. She showed them the poems she’d been writing through the 1930s, most of them published in the Spectator and the London Mercury, and they snapped them up, publishing The Glass Blower and Other Poems in 1940. In contrast to Mrs Miniver, which became a national and international bestseller, this book of poems went largely unnoticed. It was here that we see the beginnings of Jan’s depressive side. The opening lines of this poem couldn’t be further away from the light-heartedness of her Shepard collaborations:

Bankrupt of joy, who was once rich in it, Must drop pretence at last, no longer hide Behind drawn blinds, rooms ravished by distraint; Swallow his pride, And openly admit His fortune spent.

There is ambiguity here: Tony and Jan, spendthrift and broke, had been forced to move out of their family house. But ‘bankrupt of joy’ (the sprung rhythm reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins) was a state of mind as well, and one she would increasingly come to know. The great love affair of her life had not even started when she submitted that volume. There’s one poem about two lovers who, knowing that their love is a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, must go slowly and endlessly retrace their steps in order to cheat themselves into contentment. This was a premonition, because Jan would soon be doing exactly this with Dolf Placzek, the Viennese Jewish refugee with whom she fell in love in November 1939. Their love seemed like a cul-de-sac, but thanks to a succession of miracles – his getting a visa for the USA and her being sent there too as an unofficial ambassadress for Britain for the war years – it turned out not to be. A new level of ecstasy and desolation now enters her poems: this one, for example, about the Cinderella-effect brought on by the presence or absence of the beloved:

While you are here Beloved, while you are here, Happiness clothes me round like a golden gown. The young men smile, and turn their heads, and stare, As I step light-footed through the enchanted town. But when you are gone, Beloved, when you are gone, The slippers of glass will vanish, and the golden gown; And no one will look at the rags that I have on As I walk with feet of lead through the desolate town.

Through the war years, travelling around America across ‘snowy wastes of illimitable prairie’ to give lectures to vast audiences in her role as Mrs Miniver, Jan wrote poems in her notebook as she gazed out of train windows. Two of her poems attained recognition in high places. One, ‘The American Way of Life’, contrasted the real, deep, noble, brave, wise America of the Founding Fathers with the small-mindedness of isolationists. She dared to send a copy to Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote straight back, asking for permission for the President to read the poem in his next broadcast. Jan was invited to stay at the White House in July 1943, and it was here, I think, that she reached the high-water mark of her success. I love this poem about high-water marks, in The Glass Blower:

This knowledge at least is spared us: we cannot tell When any given tide on the heart’s shore Comes to the full. The crown-wave makes no signal, does not cry – ‘This is the highest. Mark it with a bright shell. It will be reached no more.’ Few could endure That knowledge, and not die. It is better to be unsure.

The other pivotal poem was ‘A Londoner in New England, 1940’. This is an elegy for the bricks of London and a tribute to the city’s spirit, written in America during the Blitz. Jan describes how she lived in London as a child, brought up on the nursery rhymes ‘London’s burning, London’s burning’ and ‘London Bridge is falling down’, and how now, far, far away, she can hear a voice ‘calmly reciting what the night has done’.

I think, ‘London’s burning, London’s burning.’ I think, ‘London Bridge is falling down.’ Then something wiser than thought says, ‘Heart, take comfort: Buildings and bridges do not make a town.

A city is greater than its bricks and mortar; It is greater than tower or palace, church or hall: A city’s as great as the people that live there. You know those people. How can London fall?’

If only the BBC had recorded and kept hold of things in those days. That poem was read aloud by Celia Johnson in the Royal Albert Hall on Thanksgiving Day 1944, at the United Thanksgiving Service. I want to hear a crackly version of Celia Johnson reading it: the great Celia, wife of Peter Fleming whose very idea it was that Jan should write about ‘an ordinary sort of woman, rather like yourself’ for the Court Page of The Times, thus bringing Mrs Miniver to birth. Straight after the last line had been read, the orchestra swept into Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture, and Churchill spoke: ‘We are moving forward surely, steadily, irresistibly and perhaps with God’s aid, swiftly, towards victorious peace.’ As for Jan’s epitaph (and ours), we can take our choice: the dark side or the light side of Looking Back at Life. The last poem she ever wrote, as she sailed away from England in 1951 for the final time, and soon to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, of which she died aged 52, was one about the seven days of de-creation, that are the essence of saying a final goodbye. The bleakness of that poem shows Jan to be someone who can plumb the depths of despair. Or you can choose as her (and our) epitaph the poem ‘Biography’ at the end of Betsinda Dances:

One day my life will end; and lest Some whim should prompt you to review it, Let her who knows the subject best Tell you the shortest way to do it: Then say, ‘Here lies one doubly blest.’ Say, ‘She was happy.’ Say, ‘She knew it.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2019